“That doesn’t mean that I am going to change the same tone I have been using for 30 years. What the hell is the difference? If you guys can’t separate tone from substance, that is your problem not mine. Stop being such whiners about tone.” –MGL

Tag Archives: prescriptivism

Deadspin has video of a wonderful scene from this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee. Here’s a recap.

Emma Ciereszynski: Hi.

Judge: Hi. “Sabermetrics”.

E.C.: Sabermetrics. Can I please have the definition?

Judge: The statistical analysis of baseball data.

E.C.: May I please have the language of origin?

Judge: It’s from an English acronym, plus a Greek-derived English part.

E.C.: Sabermetrics. S-A-B-E-R-M-E-T-R-I-C-S. Sabermetrics.

[Exeunt, to wild applause]

Can we agree that the matter is now settled once and for all? To the average person, there isn’t a more credible arbiter of spelling than the national spelling bee. I generally don’t care about the “correctness” of speech or spelling, but there is literally not one reason to British-ize the word sabermetrics.

Penning an entire post complaining about the spelling of one word makes me as much of a target as the SABR I mock regularly for their silly arguments, but this issue really gets to me. It’s been on my mind for a few weeks now and I couldn’t hold back any longer. At least I’m self-aware about it, right?

A year ago I wrote in this letter that what I do does not have a name and cannot be explained in a sentence or two. Well, now I have given it a name: Sabermetrics, the first part to honor the acronym of the Society for American Baseball Research, the second part to indicate measurement. Sabermetrics is the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records.

I don’t need to tell you how sabermetrics has taken hold since then. Basketball analysts dubbed their field APBRmetrics as a tribute, for instance. But over the past few months, I’ve seen a frightening growth in the use of a bastardization of the term. People now use sabremetrics and I have no idea why.

There’s a valid argument to be made that the word should have been sabremetrics from the start–it’s SABR nor SABER, after all–but that ship has sailed. We have thirty years of precedent now. And I’ve yet to see anyone actually argue for the use of sabremetrics on such prescriptivist grounds.

In fact, I haven’t seen anyone make any case whatsoever for why anyone should use sabremetrics over sabermetrics. Which makes its pernicious spread that much more mystifying. The best explanation I’ve come up with for its spread is that Tangotiger started using it. As recently as the beginning of November, he was using sabermetrics. Nowadays? You get the point.

I also hate another Tango-approved coinage threatening to replace a perfectly-good term with history on its side, that being saberist instead of sabermetrician. At least in that case, saberist is shorter and possibly easier to type. It’s still ridiculous to use; don’t get me wrong. And if saberist is a pointless word even with a (feeble) argument in its favor, why would anyone ever use sabremetrics?

By the way, someone tell me how I’m supposed to pronounce sabremetrics. “say-bruh-meh-tricks”? “say-bree-meh-tricks”? It certainly isn’t “say-bur-meh-tricks”, unless we’re all British now. In which case, someone point me to some good cricket SABR blogs for me to mock.

As far as I can tell, the only thing sabremetrics has going for it is the blessing of SABR God-King Tangotiger. And that’s just not enough for me. History, common sense, and the fact that baseball is American and not British all tell me to use sabermetrics. And you should too. There’s no need to replace a term that’s worked just fine for so long.